


blood in blood and hand in hand

by scioscribe



Category: Captain Marvel (2019)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, Slow Burn, Soul Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-07-19 17:41:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19977964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: “He’s on our side,” Carol said.  She looked over at Yon-Rogg, still in his Starforce black-and-green, the bruise-like colors only highlighting his sullen, wounded look; the bond between them was like an open vent, letting her feel the constant outpouring of arrogance and disapproval.  He was irate at standing on a Skrull ship as a passenger instead of an invader.Maybe she should tone down the defense.  Right now it didn’t seem too plausible.“He’s on the side of cooperating with me so I don’t rain destruction down on Hala, anyway.  He’s safe.”  She tilted her head.  “Safe-ish.  Like a declawed panther.”





	blood in blood and hand in hand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sholio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/gifts).



“I can’t go back empty-handed,” Yon-Rogg said.

He sounded weary. Carol was used to seeing him as crisp and poised as a recruitment poster; now he looked like a portrait of himself that had gotten smeared before the paint could dry. There were bruises underneath his eyes and a hectic, bluish flush across his face. His suit was torn and dusty. His hair had stiffened with sweat and dried into little points.

He didn’t look like the most respected mission commander on Hala, not now. But that was what he was.

People would listen to him. His was the face the Kree Empire had always seen in the mirror.

“How many people see you when they commune with the Supreme Intelligence?” Carol said.

His gaze sharpened. She could see him turning the question over in his mind, trying to determine what her play was.

Yon-Rogg said, “I don’t have access to that information.”

“Guess.”

“That’s impossible.”

She should reprogram his coordinates so he flew straight into the sun. “If you told the truth about the Skrulls, about the war, people on Hala would listen.”

“Once they’d seen the color of my blood, maybe.” He closed his eyes. There was a stippling of dust in his eyelashes, making them look almost blond. “And I assume when you say the truth what you mean is your mistaken pity.”

“Hey, don’t insult my pity right when you’re about to benefit from it.”

“Am I?”

Maybe. If she wanted more for herself than life as a nuclear deterrent.

“I need to know that the war’s going to stay ended,” Carol said. “I want to leave Hala behind me and know the Kree won’t start civilizing the universe again the moment my back is turned. So I send a message through you that that part of the Empire’s gone and there’s no going back.”

It was too easy to think out loud to him. She’d spent years calibrating herself that way, using him like a level to make sure her life was straight.

“And you trust me to be your messenger?”

Carol tilted her head. “Under certain circumstances.”

*

“Let me see if I’m following along here,” Fury said. “You want to go back to the other end of the galaxy and overthrow an empire. So far I’m with you. I mean, I work for an empire, but I don’t take it personally. You go back to Hala and clear up this whole good guys-bad guys misunderstanding and they leave the Skrulls alone. Easier said than done, but I’m with you there, too. What I don’t get is why you need _him_ —”

“The Kree are governed by the Supreme Intelligence,” Carol said. “It’s an AI system—”

“Like Skynet,” Monica piped up.

Fury poured himself another cup of coffee. “At this point this little girl here has more classified information than the goddamn CIA. –Sorry for the language,” he added to Maria.

“Whenever someone communes with the Supreme Intelligence, it takes on the form of whoever that person respects and admires the most.”

“Sort of like a Skrull could,” Fury observed, “though I’d guess Kree culture’s not much for that comparison.”

“We’re not,” Yon-Rogg said, his voice clipped. “The Skrulls do not have the authority granted to the Supreme Intelligence—”

“Wow, no one needs to hear what you have to say,” Carol said. “Yeah. The Kree are particular about who gets to do their shapeshifting. But _he_ ,” with a nod to Yon-Rogg, “is in the running for Supreme Intelligence MVP. He’s respected.”

“You’re telling me that for a whole bunch of people on Hala, this guy’s the face of God. And what God tells them to do, they’ll do.”

“The Supreme Intelligence is not a _deity_ , it’s—”

“Metaphorically,” Fury said, cutting Yon-Rogg off. “Okay, so he’s a good front man. Annoying as all hell, but hey, maybe planetary standards differ. But then you say you’re going to marry him and I feel like we’ve gone from A to B to not even Z, like we’re in a whole other alphabet.”

Carol was watching Maria, who hadn’t said anything yet. She had her arms folded across herself and she had that fix-anything, fly-anything kind of stare that said she was getting a handle on this—and maybe more of a handle than anybody else.

Carol answered in her direction as much as in Fury’s. “I’m not talking hearts and flowers. It’s a formality. It’s—a civic recognition of a biological process.”

Fury had a gauze pad held to one eye, but Carol could still see him raise the other eyebrow. Skeptical. “I can’t say that cleared anything up.”

“The Kree value marriages,” Yon-Rogg said. “Stable families mean a stable empire. That stability is biologically coded within us.”

Maria broke her silence and said, “If you’re a vast, planets-spanning empire, how do you all have the same biology?”

“Implants,” Carol said. “Medical technology from the Kree comes with a price.” She’d ripped one bit of Kree tech out of her body, but there were more, and the marital implant was nestled in close to the brain-stem. She pictured it curled up there like a scorpion, nesting in the back of her head, its stinger embedded in her spine. “Long life, safe childbirth, great disease immunity—but you take the tech. It changes you.”

“It’s a benefit,” Yon-Rogg said sharply. “Not a burden as you’re making it sound. This implant facilitates connection, a mutual bond.”

It was true that the Kree could have demanded more cultural-biological concessions from their conquered worlds; who’d have been able to refuse them? But their good intentions had a way of bulldozing people flat. All the better to build them up again in the new, approved image.

She wasn’t going to get into it. She didn’t necessarily want to talk to him any more than she had to, and this wasn’t some galactic Model UN. She just shrugged. “We input the code, the bond activates.”

“And people on Hala see you two as a power couple,” Maria said. “Your plan gets his status behind it, and you make sure he doesn't do anything to screw it up.”

Carol nodded.

“But what’s the implant _do_?” Monica said. She’d tucked her feet up onto her chair and was now wriggling her toes against the wicker like she was testing its tensile strength.

“It’s hard to say,” Carol said.

“Does it have to do with sex?”

“I think I’ll just start drinking,” Fury said.

Carol smiled. “It really just makes you more aware of the other person. More tied to them. If we do this, I’ll sense his feelings and he’ll sense mine. We’ll be protective of each other.”

“The problem with that is you’re counting on it being a one-way street,” Fury said as he levered a church key against a beer bottle. He hadn’t been kidding about the drinking; gotta admire somebody who knew his own mind. “One where you influence him and he doesn’t influence you. But what happens if you get mutually assured destruction and aging pretty-boy over here changes _your_ priorities?”

“He won’t,” Carol said calmly.

“And why’s that?”

Yon-Rogg spoke up, his voice frosty. “Because she thinks I lack the courage of my convictions.”

“More or less,” Carol said.

“Carol’s stronger than he is,” Maria said. “In every way you could map. I’d put my money on her every time.” She straightened up off the wall and turned her attention only to Carol now. “But is this really what you want to do with yourself? Tie your future to a guy like this, a guy who kidnapped you, lied to you, stole years of your life?”

“It’s not till death do us part. Even for the Kree, there’s divorce. Once the job’s done, once there’s peace, I’ll get the effects turned off. Let go of the leash I’ll have him on. And we’ll be done with each other.” She said that last bit to Yon-Rogg, who looked away from her. She turned back to Maria. “The Kree wanted to use me as a weapon. I’m going to be a peacemaker instead.”

“You’re the least peaceful person I’ve ever met,” Maria said. Her eyes were bright and wet.

Carol had to press her lips together to keep her mouth from wobbling. “Trust me, I’m sure I’ll still pick plenty of fights. But they’ll be on my terms. And my schedule.”

“You do this, you’re going away again,” Maria said. “I just need to know that you’re going to come back.” Her voice was even, but the tears were starting to fall now. “Maybe not for good, but sometimes.”

“I will. I promise.”

Maria touched her eyes, drying them, and breathed in. “All right. Then we’re settled. Let’s get you married to this asshole already.”

“Fury?” Carol said.

He took a long drink. “If you’re asking my permission, I’m gonna have to assume this one bottle’s hitting me hard. I don’t have any authority over you, Glowy Girl. If you’re asking me to walk you down the aisle, I guess I’d say no to that. I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“You don’t have to be in the wedding party,” Carol said. “It was more of an invitation. Kree law requires two adult witnesses.”

“Just one question before I say yes, then.” Fury looked at Yon-Rogg. “What do _you_ get out of this?”

Carol had expected Yon-Rogg to be a little rankled at being questioned, but he seemed to accept that Fury was more or less his Earth counterpart. His answer was testy and guarded, but immediate: “It’s an alliance I have the authority to form.”

“Thought you all were more the conquering type. Talos didn’t seem to think you were open to treaties.”

“With the Skrulls? Of course not. But _she_ ,” he nodded at Carol, “has proven formidable. Ronan fled from her, and Ronan’s half-mad. It’s a judgment call on my part.”

And a less humiliating defeat, but clearly he wasn’t willing to admit any personal weakness. He answered questions with the efficient, accurate opacity the Supreme Intelligence had taught them, admitting only what the enemy could already guess; it was how you were supposed to behave under torture. And he had practice at that. Carol had seen the fine white scars around the knuckles of his left hand, where his fingers had once been methodically broken. But he wasn’t a prisoner here. He was just being a dick.

Fury looked Yon-Rogg over with the caution new to a man who might’ve just lost an eye, and said, “All right. I’ll be a witness.”

“You’ve got your two, then,” Maria said.

Carol nodded. “Good. Let’s get this over with.”

“Don’t you want a dress?” Monica said. “Or flowers? Flower _girls?_ Bridesmaids? Rings?”

“She’s got the open bar,” Fury said, pouring himself another drink.

“That’s my open bar,” Maria said.

He shrugged. “Then I’ll pour you one too.”

Carol said, “It’s not that kind of wedding, Lieutenant Trouble.”

“But you said you’d have to get divorced,” Monica pointed out. “That means you’re going to be really married.”

“You’re very sharp,” Yon-Rogg said. He’d always been good with kids, and there was no trace of mockery in his voice. “There’s no strength or truth in anything unless it can end. It’s only by accepting our limitations that we can give our best to the collective. Order fails unless it is ceaselessly maintained.” He found a peach in Maria’s fruit bowl, took it, leaned back, and started to carve it into dripping, uneven shapes. “And marriages are likewise.”

“You sound like somebody in politics,” Monica said, utterly unhypnotized by him. “And that’s a dumb way to eat a peach.”

He gestured with the blade. “Take up one yourself and demonstrate for me, then.”

She did, and while she was rubbing the fuzz off on her shirt, Carol rewound the conversation and tried to guess at where Monica’s priorities really were in all this.

She said, “I’ll make you a deal. How about you finish eating that peach and then gather up all the flowers you can find in the next five minutes, and then you’ll be my flower girl?”

“Operating on a truly cosmic scale,” Yon-Rogg said.

“You’re the one who stopped for a snack,” Carol snapped. Every cell in her wanted to take the last of the fight’s adrenaline and euphoria and let it lift her up; she wanted to let all the regret and betrayal and doubt she hadn’t had time to process burn off in the atmosphere. And on top of all that, she wanted to take a shower. But she didn’t know when she’d be home again. She wanted to do whatever she could to make these last moments right.

Monica ran out into the yard, still eating her peach.

“That’s cheating!” Carol called after her.

“Hm,” Maria said, “so when you ignore the predetermined rules of engagement, you’re being clever and going off to become a superhero, but when somebody else does it, suddenly you see my side.”

Carol grinned. “That’s right.”

“You’re a softy,” Fury said. “At heart.” He’d poured white wine into two champagne flutes, making the most of Maria’s kitchen, and then came around the counter and offered her one. “Sorry, no bubbly. Here’s to your wedding. You too, Commander Blue Blood. Can’t have you getting cold feet.”

Yon-Rogg eyed the glass suspiciously but did drink, swiftly and decisively, like he was fine with poisoning himself if that option was on the table.

Carol looked out the window, clocking Monica’s position in the flowerbeds, and then said to Yon-Rogg, “Can I get a minute with you in private?”

She half-expected him to give her one of his canned bits of Kree insight, telling her not to ask a question if the answer made no difference to her, but instead he only dropped the peach pit into his empty champagne flute and nodded. He joined her at the far end of the living room, away from the square of light that framed Fury and Maria. And normalcy.

“I’m bringing the fight to the Supreme Intelligence with or without you,” she said abruptly.

“Your stubbornness isn’t in question.”

“I’m saying you have a choice here. If you’re doing this just to avoid going back to Hala without a victory, don’t. Take the shuttle and go somewhere else.”

He studied her. “Are you reneging on your offer of peace?”

“My offer of peace was always contingent on keeping your side under control. I’m going to do whatever I need to in order to achieve that. But it doesn’t have to involve you.”

Yon-Rogg shook his head, incredulous now. “You believe you’ve coerced me. And instead of being proud of your advantage, you’ve allowed guilt over it to undermine your position. I thought I taught you better than that.”

“You definitely didn’t teach me anything about guilt, no,” Carol said calmly. “That would be pretty hard, you not really being capable of it.”

He stepped away from her, changing the way the shadows fell across his face; she couldn’t read his expression now at all. He said, “You can rest easy that you haven’t forced my hand. What I do, I do for the good of all Kree. As I told your agent. Our arrangement stands, V—Carol.” He headed back to the kitchen but turned on his heel and added, “And I am _not_ an ‘aging pretty-boy.’ I’m in my prime. Yours is far from the first proposal I’ve had.”

*

Monica came back in with the flowers. Maria let her scatter the petals down the length of the hallway, Monica walking down it tossing them left and right before darting back to her place at her mom’s side. Carol and Yon-Rogg came afterwards, treading on the petals and crushing them. The scent was almost sickly-sweet.

There was no one at the end of the faux-aisle. They had to do it all themselves.

She was glad she knew what to do and didn’t have to ask him. She was done with accepting his lessons, done with taking his word for things.

She ran her fingers delicately over the control panel on the arm of her suit, keying in the trigger-pull for the Rube Goldberg device they’d built into her, a cascade of electrical impulses and hormones and alpha waves and a psychokinetic cocktail she couldn’t fool herself into believing she understood. She was playing with fire here, and she was doing it with the worst possible person. Somebody who’d already screwed her over. Somebody she could slip up and trust again. But how much blood did she want to wade through on Hala? A bond with him was her best shot at securing a quick but lasting peace. Finding a new home for the Skrulls wouldn’t do her any good if the Kree just found them there too, and she didn’t want to spend her whole life fighting the same enemy.

She looked at the glowing combination of glyphs on the suit panel and waited. She wasn’t risking a one-way bond. They’d do this at the same time or they wouldn’t do it at all.

Yon-Rogg looked down the length of the hall at their gathered crowd of witnesses and shook his head as if in dismay that his life had come to this.

He said, “Carol Danvers,” his in-world Hala accent breaking the names into just slightly overemphasized syllables. “Before these witnesses, I wed you for the good of all Kree and the satisfaction of our bargain. I pledge myself to you and allow our fates to be twined together.” He called up his own control panel and and entered the codes swiftly. He met her eyes. “I have faith in you. As an absolute concept.”

What the hell was that supposed to mean?

All they needed was to initiate the bond together, in close proximity with each other. The vows were a frill they didn’t need.

She said, “Before these witnesses, I wed you for the good of all Kree and all the civilizations trapped under their boot. And for the fulfillment of—” Her mouth was dry. The glowing glyphs that hovered above their arms were disappearing now; no further confirmation needed, apparently. It was happening. “And for the fulfillment of my promise to the Skrulls. I pledge myself to you and allow our fates to be twined together.”

“At least you’re traditional in that,” Yon-Rogg said under his breath.

She could see the last golden ghost of their encodings fading away. She got her last words in before they vanished for good. “And I accept the terms of the marriage.”

It was her soul they were talking about, after all, her whole sense of self. She was pledging it to Yon-Rogg right after she’d gotten it back under her control. Might as well have it on the record that she knew what was on the price tag for all this.

“Are you going to kiss?” Monica said after a couple of seconds had passed.

Yon-Rogg scoffed. “Unlikely.”

“The Kree don’t kiss?” Fury said. His gaze was too sharp for the number of drinks he’d seemed to put away, and Carol wondered if he’d been watering them down or if his tolerance was just superhuman.

“Sexuality is a private endeavor.”

“So you two won’t be doing the garter toss.”

“I’ll answer that,” Carol said. “Also unlikely.”

“Guess you should be hitting the road then,” Fury said. “Kicking off the honeymoon.”

His voice was just a shade too flat. Carol thought she could put together why, more or less—he’d told her he didn’t like the idea of this little alliance. His duty was to Earth, full-stop. He wasn’t quite ruthless enough to detain her, but he still had to see her as a human weapon maybe going rogue, maybe falling into the wrong hands, and that meant their friendship could be a liability. He was too smart to miss that their loyalties might not always be compatible. He was a secret agent and she was compromised. Too many citizenships.

If she had to guess, she’d say—optimistically—that he was annoyed at having a personal stake in it. He liked her as much as she liked him.

She kept her tone light. “You gonna miss me, Agent Fury?”

He leaned against the wall. “You know, I think I will. How about you keep in touch.”

Not a question. Carol nodded. Interstellar communication was—complicated, and she doubted even SHIELD had the tech for it, but she could give him a boost. Maria too. “I don’t want to spend another six years in the dark.”

 _There is more light elsewhere than here._ She fitted the words to the sudden flash of tired contempt against her mind, a light flicker of foreign feeling. _His_ feeling, not her own.

So that was happening. Great.

* **  
**

“I’m confused,” Talos said.

_You and me both._

“He’s on our side,” Carol said. She looked over at Yon-Rogg, still in his Starforce black-and-green, the bruise-like colors only highlighting his sullen, wounded look; the bond between them was like an open vent, letting her feel the constant outpouring of arrogance and disapproval. He was irate at standing on a Skrull ship as a passenger instead of an invader.

Maybe she should tone down the defense. Right now it didn’t seem too plausible.

“He’s on the side of cooperating with me so I don’t rain destruction down on Hala, anyway. He’s safe.” She tilted her head. “Safe-ish. Like a declawed panther.”

Yon-Rogg turned towards her slightly, sending out a sense of polite inquiry.

Asshole. Of course he was leaning into the empathic thing. He probably relished any chance to get under her skin. She should have ignored him, but she needed to test the limits of this bizarre biological radio, so she sent back an image instead. She felt the cool ruffle of his mind against hers: he’d gotten her drift, and he was flattered by the comparison.

“I trust you,” Talos said, the simplicity of the words somehow hitting her hard, “but he’s—a complication. Excess baggage. And I _don’t_ trust _him_ , not even close. I wouldn’t think you would either, considering everything he’s done to you.”

“I saved her life,” Yon-Rogg said.

“Oh, I love that sense of Kree charity. Always so helpful. So unwilling to figure out why the rest of us wouldn’t want to be _saved_ by you.”

Yon-Rogg started forward at that, but Carol grabbed his shoulder and tugged him back into line.

“We got married,” she said crisply. “I’ve got a handle on him.”

Yon-Rogg bristled. “Reciprocity entails—”

“He’ll help us,” Carol said, “and having poster boy here aligned with me is going to make the whole hearts-and-minds part of changing Hala a lot easier. I had this exact conversation with Fury. I’ve thought this through.”

“In the roughly two hours I was away from you,” Talos said. “Thorough.”

“I move fast. Kind of my specialty.” She held his gaze. “But I know what I’m doing. I won’t let him cause any problems for you. We’ll get you to a safe planet and then we’ll both be out of your hair—metaphorically.”

Talos shook his head. “If he’s part of all this, Carol, I can’t take you up on your offer. I can’t have a Kree Commander—let alone that one—knowing exactly how to find our new home. We’ll have to do our searching on our own. I’m sorry.”

She’d had to stand by and watch Fury’s ease with her cool to something more tentative and calculated; she wasn’t going to let it happen with Talos, too. He’d been her way out of being just a cog in the Supreme Intelligence’s machine. She couldn’t let the Skrulls go off without an escort. They were capable fighters, but the numbers just weren’t in their favor. Every dead Skrull was like a wiped-out city on Earth as far as population percentages went. That would be on her head.

She folded her arms across her chest, trying to keep her poker face intact. Her guilt shouldn’t be a factor in all this. “What would it take to convince you?”

Talos gave her a little half-smile. “Just tossing ideas around, of course, but we could always kill him.”

She knew he was joking—mostly joking—but she was surprised by the way the suggestion made her hands tighten up. Power beat in her fingertips, stronger than the pulse of her blood.

It took effort to keep her voice dry and light. “Assume that’s off the table.”

Talos studied her. “You won’t like it,” he said finally.

“I’m good at dealing with things I don’t like.”

“And he made you that way. Carol—”

She cut him off. “Just tell me.”

“We could excise the memory from him,” Talos said. “Once we choose a planet. We have the tech for it—we could lift it out cleanly. No coordinates in his head for him to give away to the Supreme Intelligence or anyone else. No collateral damage to the rest of his mind.”

There was nothing from Yon-Rogg at that, not that she could feel; either he’d gotten a hell of a lot better at shielding himself from her in the last few minutes or he was just too tired by now to acknowledge any further sense of indignity. He wasn’t pleading with her to refuse the terms, but he wasn’t giving her an out, either.

It was a legitimate request. It made her sick to think about it—she could go the whole rest of her life without any mind-fuckery, thanks—but it was reasonable.

“That’s moving him back and forth between ally and prisoner,” Carol said.

“It’s a crime,” Talos agreed. “Given the stakes, I’m willing to commit it. But I need to know that you’re not going to try to stop me when the time comes. I’m not a fool, I know I can’t stand up against you. You don’t have to think it’s the right thing to do, but if you can’t stand by and let us do it anyway, tell me now.”

She prodded at the link between her and Yon-Rogg, trying to provoke him into some kind of response, but he wouldn’t budge. He wasn’t giving her anything to go on. And she didn’t have a good choice here.

So her hands would stay filthy a little while longer, apparently. At least Talos was honest about the fact that he was asking her to be party to a crime; the Kree had never done her that courtesy.

Carol said, “Fine. Deal.”

“So much for your vaunted fears of coercion,” Yon-Rogg said once Talos had left the room. He was holding himself stiffly, so prepared for a fight that he wouldn’t have been in any shape to handle if it actually came. If he was hoping that would convince her not to take another swing at him, he really didn’t know her at all. She was owed way more than one sucker punch. “It seems that with your own questionable loyalties on the line, you can make the same call I did. And do it to a friend, no less.”

“You’re not my friend,” Carol said. They were on the rear observation deck, a tiny bubble of steel and smudged synth-glass. She looked at dingy stars instead of at him.

“I suppose you’re right. I’m not your friend, I’m your husband.” He said the word with a faint twinge of distaste.

“Don’t even try to compare us,” she said, instead of addressing that husband-and-wife bullshit. Just because it was technically true didn’t make it worth discussing. “Don’t pretend that you can’t tell the difference between the Skrulls acting in self-defense and you _eviscerating_ my memory to keep me under the Empire’s thumb.”

“The Supreme Intelligence commanded—”

“And you could have said no.”

He looked at her with honest confusion. “No one defies the Supreme Intelligence.”

“I did.”

_Irritation-guilt-uncertainty-anger-shame._

“I’m not you,” Yon-Rogg said at last.

No kidding. “You’re shielding sometimes,” she said, changing the subject. “I’m not getting everything from you. Why so emotionally withholding, Commander? We need to go to couples’ therapy already?”

He sat down on the long wraparound bench, leaning back against the bulkhead. “I’m sure any counselor we employed would more than earn their pay. And you started it.”

“That’s mature.”

“The only indication of your presence in my mind has been a zoology lesson,” Yon-Rogg said. His tone was clipped. “Aside from that, I’ve felt nothing from you. I’m being comparatively generous.”

“Bet you love telling yourself that.” She sat down beside him, not entirely liking her new, heightened awareness of the distance between her thigh and his. “I’m not blocking you on purpose.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“Yeah, I assume the technique was covered in some Kree sex ed class. Along with the condom on the banana.”

“You always were too much of a comedian,” Yon-Rogg said. He rubbed his forehead. “But yes, more or less. I’m being deliberate, to the extent that I’m able—it takes a good deal of concentration—and you, as always, are being instinctual. You don’t trust me.”

“Not even a little,” she agreed. His hurt at that felt petty, like a skinned knee. He could make a sadist out of her if she wasn’t careful—and she didn’t want that. She shouldn’t even care enough about his reactions to poke and prod at him to get them.

The ship started rumbling around them, the engines cycling into gear and cutting through their silence.

Carol stood. “I have to go scout. Otherwise they’re flying blind.”

“Wouldn’t want that,” Yon-Rogg said, with an acid-looking smile. With a shower and a patch-up, he’d be back to being every inch the weapon the Supreme Intelligence had shaped him to be. It was only over the bond that she could feel a kind of messy, ragged-edged ache to him, like he was the same peach he’d mutilated back at Maria’s. Maybe that was how the Supreme Intelligence used its favorites up, bite by bite.

She didn’t know what to do about him. She turned away, heading for the airlock.

“I’ll be back later on. If you cause any trouble for the Skrulls, I’m going to let them vent you out to join me, your suit not included. Don’t test me.”

“I would call this a suboptimal honeymoon,” Yon-Rogg said. He nudged a feeling at her, letting it curl up against her mind like a stray cat on a front porch: it had some tentative sense of awareness that wherever it might want, it couldn’t come in.

*

It was a while before Carol saw him again. She hadn’t really been avoiding him; she just hadn’t been on the ship at all.

She had a pilot’s love—gear-headed and sensual and visceral—for every plane she’d ever flown, from rattling crop-dusters to a training puddle jumper all the way up to the PEGASUS flights and the _Asis_. She could close her eyes and make her way back through all those cockpits like counting sheep. She’d done it a few times already just to luxuriate in the memory, in the fact of having a reachable past at all. The truth was that she’d fly any of those planes again, even the lemons and the shitheaps, the ones with busted altimeters and compasses with no heading indicators. She loved it too much to quit.

But none of it compared to just _flying_. To having all the stars spread out within her reach. To careening through a planet’s atmosphere, superheated to the point that she got tipped with blue flame. She hadn’t wanted to come inside at all.

The problem was that pointing out directions and then flitting away eventually started to make her feel like Tinkerbell. So she was going to dole the Disney out sparingly.

And it had taken _something_ out of her to keep herself alive out there. She wasn’t sure where her limits were yet, but _nowhere_ was probably too optimistic. She had to feel this out.

It made sense to come in for a shower and a few hours of sleep, maybe see if the Skrulls had any human-compatible food on hand, and she’d gotten all the way through toweling her hair dry when she sensed him: close. Agitated.

He was pacing up and down the length of the ship’s gymnasium. There were little white flecks of saliva on his lips like he’d gone rabid in her absence. He stopped and stared as she came out of the common showers and tossed her towel in the laundry.

“Carol,” he said.

He was so panicky, the bond between them a froth kicked up by a drowning man, and it actually had her worried enough that she cut to the chase. “What’s the matter with you?”

“You’ve been gone for _six days_.”

“And?”

He swallowed; she noticed little nicks around his throat and cheeks where he’d cut himself shaving and patches of dark stubble where he’d just given up on it. “I started having trouble. The—distance, the duration. Our marriage is too new for this kind of separation.”

“Mm, yeah, long-distance relationships can be challenging.”

Yon-Rogg exhaled. “You’re unaffected.”

“I’m tired,” she said, testing out the possibility that it had something to do with him. “But I’ve been living in dead space for almost a week. I just got done washing moondust out of my hair and I’d kill for a sandwich. Not really sure that qualifies as spiritual and profound.”

“Your friend should be satisfied, then,” he said stiffly. “You’re significantly stronger than I am.”

“I knew that already.” What she hadn’t known was that Yon-Rogg was capable of even having a hair out of place, let alone razor burn and a five o’clock shadow. She’d seen him less unkempt in the middle of a warzone.

Actually, it was in the middle of a warzone that she’d once held the razor for him; he’d taken a hit with a nerve-scrambler that had briefly knocked the sensitivity in his extremities down to almost nothing. He hadn’t been able to walk for a day and a half, when the feeling finally started trickling back. He’d ordered her to leave him there, but she hadn’t, and she’d used a field kit to keep him clean-shaven. She still remembered the woodsy scent of the lather.

Before she could stop herself, Carol said, “Do you remember that time on Kraitus IV?”

“My helplessness? Unfortunately.” But she saw his hand steal up to his chin, his thumb grazing across the stubble.

“I didn’t know you were having a hard time. While I was out there.”

His face didn’t change, but there was a little pulse-skip of hopefulness there; suspicious hopefulness, which might have been the only kind he was capable of. He wanted to believe her. “My mistake, then. I assumed you were making a point.”

Carol shook her head. “I don’t play mind games. What do you need?”

“I—” He was having trouble spitting it out. “Physical contact would be helpful.”

“Not sex,” she said.

The yearning she was getting from him was so plain it was almost a word: _anything, anything, anything_.

She bit back another sigh—it wasn’t his fault—and said, “Fine. Do you have quarters somewhere around here? I haven’t grabbed any yet.”

“The Skrulls were civilized enough to not require I camp out in the hallway.”

Even falling apart at the seams, he could still be such a dick. “They could have put you in the brig.”

He led the way, his step faster than normal, almost a puppyish rush-and-tumble in his eagerness to get to his room. He had locked his emotions away again—though she could feel a flimsiness to the void between them, like it would give way if she tapped on it—and he kept his voice level, so she was sure he figured he was being inscrutable.

“They’re too afraid of your wrath to jail me without cause.”

“They have cause.”

“Your radical notions of—here.” He stopped short and palmed a lock, opening his door.

The room was neat but the air inside was a little stale, tinged with the sharp, bitter smell of stress. If she had to guess, she’d say that he’d been right here most of the time she’d been gone. He wouldn’t have wanted the Skrulls to see him come undone.

Carol powered down the top half of her uniform until it slackened and separated, leaving her in just the black softshell undershirt. This whole thing felt like a high-stakes version of Seven Minutes in Heaven. She turned the idea over and over again in her head, a prism that threw off a different color of light from every angle. She didn’t have one clean way to feel about this. That would have been nice.

Was Fury right? Was all this changing her too?

At least this wasn’t anything she hadn’t done before.

Yon-Rogg had lined the contents of his gear-belt out along the desk, each arranged at a precise parallel to the edge. She found the shaving kit without any trouble.

“Sit down.”

He sat on the edge of the bed and she dragged the desk chair over to him and sat there herself, leaning forward enough to let their knees touch.

She’d say this for the Kree: they were good with military gear. Everything was compact and ingeniously packaged. They fit a lot of order onto these belts, almost enough to convince the galaxy that they should be the only ones to ever enforce it.

She spread the shaving gel across his cheeks, the heat of their bodies activating it into a thin white lather. He’d done such a patchwork job on himself that the pads of her fingers kept skimming between smooth skin and rough stubble. It made her feel hyper-sensitized. The gel had a tingle to it, too, a kind of menthol-like stun. She spread it up and down the column of his throat, going gently around the little nicks there, and then picked up the waterless razor and got started.

“You’ve got all these cuts,” she said casually. “Were your hands shaking?”

He waited until she’d pulled the razor back a little to answer. Cautious of him. “Yes. Somewhat.”

She hadn’t been starved for him while she’d been out flying, but she had to admit that touching him satisfied something in her: like verifying a familiar landmark when groping through a dark room. _There you are._

On Kraitus IV there’d been an intimacy to all this, a familiarity great enough that she’d felt like she might as well have been doing it to herself; his blood in her blood, her hands for his hands. It was stranger now, but there was something in it there hadn’t been before. They’d introduced suspense. She could kill him with this. They could fuck. She could learn to like him again. Anything could happen.

What actually happened was that she finished up and wiped the razor clean.

Yon-Rogg’s breathing had evened out a little.

“That helped somewhat,” he said. “Thank you.”

She nodded. “When did it start getting bad?”

“Three or four days into your absence.”

“What was it like?”

“Sounding clinical doesn’t disguise the fact that you’re smug.” He edged forward, putting his shins against hers, their boots toe-to-toe. Maybe he was bartering, her touch for his data. “Insomnia, loss of appetite, elevated stress levels. I’ve had worse.”

The sudden occlusion of his shielding told her he was lying, selling the pain short.

“I’ll cap any scouting missions at four days, then. Three if I can.”

The rush of his gratitude hit like a tidal wave, but all he said was, “I’d appreciate that.”

*

Talos had assigned her her own quarters, complete with a bed that felt like the mattress was stuffed with marshmallow fluff. Getting her memories back hadn’t cleaned the clutter out of her head and apparently staying awake for six days hadn’t exhausted her, so she fell back into an old habit and went to Yon-Rogg’s door when she found she couldn’t sleep.

“It will open for you,” he said, stepping aside to let her in. He rubbed at his eyes: clearly their little shaving session had worked well enough to alleviate some of _his_ sleeplessness. “You don’t have to bang. I already gave you an override.”

“Why?”

He looked at her with his patented weary frustration and said, “Because we’re married, naturally.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“I have respect for the institution. And if you really wanted to get in and I’d locked the door, you’d just punch through it anyway. This seemed easier.”

“Practical,” Carol said. “I like it. Want to fight?”

He did, or at least he wasn’t willing to turn down a chance for additional physical contact. She was willing to take advantage of that for the good old-fashioned pleasure of sweat and traded bruises; he could just be grateful she was holding back this time. Their sparring sessions shifted gradually to involve more grappling.

“You’re winning more often,” he said one day, looking at her suspiciously. “You’re reading my intentions. You know I can’t divide my attention to fight and shield at the same time.”

“I’m appreciating the benefits of matrimony.”

“You’re cheating.”

“You’re losing,” Carol said. She turned and delivered a roundhouse kick that knocked him back, staggering. “Is this the part where you tell me you’re proud of me again?”

He let out a short sound that it took her a second to realize was a laugh. “I don’t revisit losing strategies.”

*

The search for a new home for the Skrulls kept stretching out. They were on the rim of the familiar, spacefaring part of the galaxy, past Kree control but still findable on the star-charts, and the pickings for empty worlds were slim to none. There weren’t many Skrulls left—the Kree had seen to that—so they would have settled for an already-populated planet as long as they could set up their own community there. They’d had enough of being scattered; keeping them together didn’t seem like much to ask. But the settled worlds with sufficient free land didn’t always give it up for the asking. And they couldn’t afford to cause a stir.

They were down to three more possibilities before they tumbled off the edge of the map, and Yon-Rogg, of all people, ruled one of those possibilities out.

He was standing next to her, looking at the charts, and she felt a sudden prickle from him—contained unease, internal debate.

“What is it?”

He studied her for a moment and then pointed. “That one. The Supreme Intelligence has an interest in it, despite the unfavorable location. The mining is promising enough for it to be a possibility for a future Imperial outpost.”

“I’m guessing that would come as a surprise to the people already living there.”

“There are compensations,” Yon-Rogg said tightly. “You aren’t unaware of that.”

“I like freedom.”

“It has to be governed.”

“And always, just coincidentally, by the Kree.” Some of her bitterness was for him—he’d taught her half the lies she’d swallowed down, he’d sugar-coated them for her—but more of it was for herself, for ever believing that bullshit at all.

Then again, he’d sold it so well because he believed it himself; if she’d ever doubted that, she could tell by the vague, stymied confusion that seemed to leak out of him whenever they hit this kind of impasse. He was too smart to think it was the sugar all the way down, but he’d always been content to believe the bitter core was necessary, to believe that he was smarter and more insightful for accepting it.

But he had told her about the outpost. He’d had a chance to let the Skrulls fall back unknowingly into Kree space and he hadn’t taken it.

Then again, she’d asked. She’d sensed his loss of composure. Would he have said anything if she hadn’t?

“Can you feel anything from me yet?” she said.

He looked over, startled. “No. Why?”

 _Just making sure I haven’t started trusting you again_ , she thought, but she bit back saying it. She didn’t want to feel the sting she knew it would leave on him. “Just curious.”

She thought he’d maybe guessed her reasoning anyway; his lips tightened up and _something_ radiated out of him, a bruised-like feeling. He folded his hands behind his back. “We may want to avoid the known system altogether. Maybe you have nothing but affection for the Skrulls—foolishly—but it’s not many civilizations that would bend over backwards to welcome invaders who can change their shape at will. They’re a safety hazard. And empty worlds are hard to come by, if they’ve actually been charted. This isn’t anything you don’t already know.”

“It’s not like worlds that can sustain life but _don’t_ have active, thriving populations already are that easy to find.”

“Just choose somewhere primitive. Like your homeworld.”

She rolled her eyes. “So primitive we sent Ronan running.”

“ _You_ sent Ronan running.”

She expected him to follow that up with some comment about her powers only coming from a brush with Kree-designed tech, but he didn’t.

“Okay,” she said, after a beat. “I don’t want us settling on worlds _close_ to a potential Kree outpost, either. So I guess it’s uncharted territory from here on out.”

There was an openness to his side of the bond, a kind of emptiness she couldn’t quite parse. She could trace her way there, the only traffic along a one-way street, and when she did, she dead-ended eventually in that little hollow inside him.

He half-closed his eyes. “ _Must_ you do that?”

She hadn’t realized he could feel her. She retreated swiftly: hand out of the cookie jar. “Sorry.”

“What were you looking for?”

He was probably entitled to a sliver of honesty in reply. “Whatever was there. The place felt empty.”

His smile was thin. “Not entirely. There was you.”

“What’s supposed to be there? What did it feel like from your end?”

Yon-Rogg’s fingers glanced against his breastbone. “Here.” He didn’t offer up any further explanation than that.

Carol scrutinized him, taking in the slight shadows under his eyes, and stepped closer, putting her arm through his and leaning on him. He sagged against her, his exhalation loud in the hush of the observation deck. So he’d really needed this, then.

“You don’t always have to wait for me to touch you,” she said. “I get it.” She stiffened only a little as he took her at her word, resting his cheek and temple against the top of her head.

She could feel how she felt to him—the overwhelming relief of contact, the sharply defined sensory detail of her hair against his skin, the soft unfulfilled hunger of it all. And suddenly she had an idea of what had once gone in that hollow place inside him. The Supreme Intelligence’s approval, his team’s love, the respect of billions upon billions of Kree. All that adoration. All that rock solid ground. Now all he had was her and a ship full of old enemies.

_I have faith in you. As an absolute concept._

She said, “Thanks for the heads-up about the outpost.”

*

The next time Carol went to his quarters in the middle of the night, he said, “Let me just get changed,” right away, already starting to turn towards his closet.

“I wasn’t thinking of a workout.” She listened to the soft pneumatic hiss of the door closing behind her. “It just occurred to me that sleeping in the same bed would be an efficient way to give you your recommended dose of vitamin me.”

She could see him looking her over, taking in that she was, in fact, wearing the Tweety Bird boxers and white cotton shirt that constituted her Skrull-issued pajamas—Earth-bought and guided by Mar-Vell’s sense of humor.

“I would have insisted on something more dignified,” he said, gesturing to the boxers.

“I get a solid eight hours maybe every two weeks now that I’m running full-tilt. I’m not spending enough time in them to care.” She was lying. She liked the Tweety boxers because she could think of them lying out in some three-pack in a cheap store, think of Mar-Vell smiling at them and bringing them to the cash register. She could think of Monica’s Marvin the Martian T-shirt that had bled its colors out all over the washing machine. She’d take history over dignity any day.

She hadn’t noticed the faint checkered pattern on his own dark blue pajama pants. So they were from Earth, too, your basic plaid Father’s Day pajamas. They’d probably come with a shirt too, not that he ever seemed to use it. She surveyed the flat plane of his stomach, the dark dusting of hair over his chest.

So she was horny. It had been a while.

She cleared her throat. “Gotta say, this is more hesitation than I expected.”

“It ‘just occurred’ to you to share a bed with me,” Yon-Rogg said.

“Figure of speech. I considered it a couple weeks back, too.”

“What has changed since then?”

Hard to say. He still wasn’t the easiest person to be around—he was all challenge and bristle now that he was the one being asked to defer. He was still the person who’d lied to her and manipulated her. But she could feel the surge of attention he gave her when she came into a room. She knew that her fighting was better, sure, but his was worse, because he’d stopped guarding himself and started pulling his punches as a matter of routine. Stripped of his clout and mystique, shouldered with a cause he’d never wanted, he was—bearing up well enough.

Not that it mattered. This wasn’t a reward she was doling out for good behavior.

She said, “I’m less mad at you now.” Somewhat true. “And I don’t need to keep you on some kind of starvation diet where you have just enough bond-contact or whatever to stay alive.”

“You have no idea what it feels like.”

“Yeah, actually, I do. I can feel it when _you_ feel it.”

He pressed his lips together for a second. “Not as intensely. There’s a difference between feeling pain and hearing a scream.”

“Sure. Your pain is unbelievably special and important. I couldn’t possibly know what loneliness feels like.”

He sighed and turned towards the bed. “Do you prefer the wall side or the other side?”

Not where she’d expected that to go, but sure. “Other side.”

“If someone comes through the door shooting, they’ll hit you first.” He flipped the sheet down and slid into the bed, lying back against the wall. “But since you’re apparently invincible, I suppose that doesn’t matter.”

“Nope.” She slid her shoes out of the way under the bed. “Lights off.”

So it was dark when she joined him in bed, her back to his chest. She reached behind her and grabbed his hand and moved it to her hip.

“Does that work for you?”

She heard him swallow. “Yes. Do you still have those dreams?”

“I think the chances of me freaking out in the middle of the night and killing you are low.”

“That’s comforting. And not what I asked.”

She closed her eyes. “Sometimes.”

“I’ll understand if this situation isn’t repeated,” he said quietly. “All things considered. But I am grateful for it.”

She felt his breath stirring her hair. “You’re welcome.”

There was a quiet swirl of thought in his head as he tried to put something into words. “I was wrong to imply that you couldn’t understand isolation.”

Yeah, he had been. She shifted slightly, liking the way he moved to stay in contact with her. “What were you and the Supreme Intelligence planning on doing with me, by the way?”

The question jolted him. “What?”

“You scooped me up off Earth, brought me back to Hala, melon-balled my memories. What did you guys hope to get from all that?”

He kept his mind open to hers as he answered, and all at once Carol wondered if there was a whole Kree marriage etiquette she’d never learned about—if Yon-Rogg would have thought it unforgivably rude to not let her see that he was answering her honestly. “I was never privy to all the Supreme Intelligence’s hopes for you. In any case, it became clear early on that your powers were unwieldy. We might not have been able to use you, but we couldn’t afford to leave you for an enemy. But I _scooped you up_ , as you put it, because it seemed like a waste to leave you to die.”

The Kree hated unused resources. He’d picked her up like a soda can he’d reflexively decided to recycle.

But she could see it play out in his head, the decision less principled than he believed: a wash of admiration and arrogance and responsibility. He’d respected her skills. He’d needed to win. He’d needed to not have a mission scrapped without so much as a trace of salvage.

The person he’d been back then wouldn’t have ever made any other choice.

She didn’t know what he’d do now. All those same feelings were still there.

She said, “You know the Supreme Intelligence isn’t going to be wild about us coming back as a package deal.”

“I’m not expecting to _gain_ further clearance from it, if that’s what you’re asking.”

It wasn’t. He’d said, _No one defies the Supreme Intelligence_ , but now he’d boxed himself into doing just that. He was too smart not to know it.

Same soul, same feelings. Twisted around into a new direction.

Hours later, when she wasn’t even sure he was awake to hear her, she said, “I can ask Talos to reconsider the deal we made about your memory. You’ve played ball so far—”

“No.” The only feeling she was picking up from him was sleepiness and a kind of muddled disbelief. “Don’t waste your time. If he’d say yes to that, he’s a fool. And their alliance with you would be better-served by their continued trust—which I doubt would survive my knowing where to someday send them a care package.”

“Roll over,” she said. When he did, she drew her knees up so they could rest inside his. She could see his bare back in the dark. There was the bruise she’d left on him in their last bout. He was right about his memory, probably. She put her hand between his shoulders and watched it rise and fall with his breath.

He was waiting for her to say something else, she could tell, so she said, “Sorry I woke you.” Probably more palatable to him than, _Your priorities have really changed, huh?_

“I assumed disturbing my rest was one of your favorite ways to entertain yourself.”

“It’s in the top ten.” She took her hand away from his back but settled it on his stomach, her arm slung across him. “Go back to sleep.”

*

They were thirteen planets deep into this new system when they found a world that seemed like it might be habitable.

Ordinarily Carol would have reconnoitered the planet alone, armed with a freakish number of vials Soren had pressed upon her and a whole tablet’s worth of instructions about soil and air samples. It just made the most sense for her to go by herself given she could breathe even in pure vacuum, and anybody else would need life support. Resources had gotten more precious since they’d skittered off the edge of the known universe. Might as well conserve them where they could.

But this time she had Yon-Rogg with her, for the simple reason that her scouting mission beforehand had pressed into four and a half days. It had come down to either delaying the surface study while she replenished his stock of quality Carol time or declaring an impromptu Bring Your Husband to Work Day. The latter seemed easier.

“Okay.” She waited until her scanner flashed its completed atmosphere reading. “The meter says there’s a slightly higher concentration of chlorine in the air than on Hala, but not enough for it to be a problem. You can lose the helmet.”

He did, wrinkling his nose at the smell. “Vile.”

“I like it,” Carol said. “Reminds me of a pool.” She tossed the image over to him: a glassy blue park swimming pool littered with kids and red-and-white inflatable balls, her hair streaking green from the chlorine, the smell of the water mingling with the heavy coconut scent of a dozen different brands of suntan oil.

She knew he still couldn’t read her the way she read him, but she’d made more of an effort lately to play with the connection, sending him those kinds of pictures or deliberate pulses of feelings. It seemed to relax him.

After a moment he said, “My brother used to take me swimming.”

She could count on one hand the number of times she’d heard him talk about his family. Or anything personal, ever. She kept her voice neutral. “Yeah?”

“The lake was natural. So clear you could see all the way down to the bottom, and when you stepped in near the edge, the fleet-minnows would come and nibble at your feet. Kit-Rinn tried to convince me that the wrinkles in my fingers and toes after we emerged were the result of tiny little bites.” His mouth was soft rather than curved, and for some reason she thought it looked more genuine on him than a smile would have. He was at ease.

“Where is he now?”

Well, there went the ease. “He died.”

There was nothing to do for it but keep her response simple: “I’m sorry.”

“He was ill,” Yon-Rogg said. “There was a little less of him each day. Maybe not unlike being eaten to death by fleet-minnows, actually. I always thought going in battle would be better, cleaner—that’s what I wanted for myself.” He looked her over: that command look, an assessment. “You could have done it.”

“You could have killed me when I was unconscious by the lake.”

He shook his head. “You were useful.”

“So are you.”

“As an errand boy for the Skrulls?”

“I think you’re really more my errand boy,” Carol said. “That suit you better?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.” He sounded like it pained him.

“Kind of like a partner,” she added. She didn’t know how he’d take it, really: he’d been her commander and then he’d been her prisoner and then her reluctant, disgruntled ally. He needed her, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.

But pleasure shone out of him at that before he recollected himself and tucked his emotions away, a blue flush on his cheekbones, sort of unfortunately appealing. “A partner, then.” He crouched down and became immediately, intensely interested in taking soil samples.

She drifted away from him to examine some of the rocks. There were streaked with deep veins of some teal mineral—Soren would want to look at those for sure. Minerals could mean fuel, valuable exports, construction material. She bagged a few.

Behind her, Yon-Rogg said, “I know nothing about your family.”

“Not much to know. You met the best of them—the nonbiological component. Maria and her daughter Monica. My parents—” She felt her throat tighten. Everything she’d dealt with, and this still tripped her up, every single time. She guessed she wouldn’t have gone over her life choosing what memories to keep and which to leave shrouded for good, but if she’d started being that picky, this one would have been thrown on the burn pile. “I was never what they were looking for. I didn’t have anyone in my corner until Maria came along.”

“I—” He was still crouched down, one hand resting on the ground. It was just a pose now, he had to be done with that spot. “I regret treating your life carelessly. Perhaps something could have been done without uprooting you. The most expedient course wasn’t the best one.”

She flexed her lips in what wasn’t quite a smile. “It’s war. My hands are filthy with it too. That’s what Talos said to me, when the weight of what I’d been doing to the Skrulls hit home.”

“I resent that,” Yon-Rogg said. There was just a shade of humor over their bond. “That brief attempt to trick me into admiring the words of a Skrull war leader.”

“You should admire him. He’s admirable. He kept his people together when the whole Kree Empire was trying to destroy them. And he outmaneuvered you.”

“He had help.”

“You both did. That’s what that ‘whole Kree Empire’ thing means.”

“Fine. You’re extremely irritating. I concede his skills and… character. His ability to coin a phrase.” He stood up. “I wish them safety, you know. They’re not—what I imagined.” He moved to a nearby plant and uprooted it carefully, sliding it into a long green bag. “This stinks like bad meat.”

“Luckily for us, the Skrulls don’t have a strong sense of smell. Get those leaves and fruits off that other one, too. We need to know what percentage of the vegetation is edible.” She had higher hopes for the non-rotten-meat plant, even if it was almost tree-sized, too big to easily transport in its entirety. It had fleshy, roughly pear-shaped growths dangling from its vine-like branches. Could be food.

“I’m aware of how to conduct a planetary survey, Carol.”

He still said her name with that Kree lilt, the split in the middle of the word. She was coming around to the sound of it, the awkward patchwork between her old Earth life and her old Hala life. The sign of something new.

She heard the snick of his scissors closing around a leaf. He turned and displayed it to her, as if to prove that he knew what he was doing. His eyebrows were raised.

Then it all went to hell.

The vines came alive, reacting to their snipped leaf like it was an amputated limb and springing into a frenzied violence. They dragged Yon-Rogg backwards, tightening around him until their ropy fibers cut in so deeply they drew blood. Every pear that brushed against his bare skin turned an ominous blue, swelling grotesquely.

More tendrils snaked outwards, reaching towards her. She blasted them, but that just made the ones on him tighten even further. She could smell his blood in the air—one of the pears had burst open.

The plant was drinking his blood. Draining him.

And, God, she could feel his pain and feel how he was scrabbling at it, trying to contain it. The vine around his throat was cinched so close he could barely breathe.

Her powers were a hammer, not a scalpel. She couldn’t fry the vines without knocking him out in the process.

Up close and personal, then.

But the second she stepped toward him, Yon-Rogg dropped his attempt at shielding and just blasted some essence of warning in her direction.

More vines escaped. She cut them all asunder.

His mind against hers: _DANGER NO NO NO NO_.

 _Fuck you,_ Carol thought. _Yes._

She wrapped herself in energy, burning away whatever touched her, and cut through the vines. It was a rush job, almost clumsier than she could stand, but she had to get him out of there—the steady drumbeat of him in her head had dropped to almost nothing and he was slumped now, white-faced.

She reached around him, fixing her hands on either side of the plant’s trunk, pouring destruction down it. It made a horrible noise, like bubbling tar, and finally gave up, releasing Yon-Rogg and sending him tumbling into her. She dragged him back away from the blackened husk of the plant, farther back than she’d ever seen its vines reach.

He was unconscious. She checked his pulse: faint but there.

But he’d lost so much blood. The places where the fruit had touched him were open wounds, a sickening blue-black. And their bond felt like it was tied off right outside her head, like he wasn’t there at all. She’d gotten used to feeling him out there, another part of herself. Her complication. Her hang-up. Her prisoner-ally-partner.

“Don’t you fucking dare die.” Her voice was a kind of shaky snarl. “I’m not even remotely done being mad at you yet. Do you hear me?” She pressed her hand into his cheek. No stubble now. “You do not get catharsis just because we told a couple of stories to each other. We’re not _resolved_. You _owe_ me. You haven’t held up your end of the deal yet.”

She slung him over her shoulders, willing herself to believe that the blood loss hadn’t really made him feel light, almost insubstantial, and she made it a few steps before it sank in that she had nowhere to take him. They hadn’t come down in a landing pod. He’d worn his shielding at max, helmet up, and the descent hadn’t been anything more than an afternoon stroll to her. But they couldn’t go back like that. Even with his armor and the atmosphere regulators, his body wasn’t in any condition to survive that kind of transfer. She could comm up for them to send a pod down to her, but it would take time, and she didn’t _have_ time, goddammit, they were working off minutes, seconds.

She tried expanding the energy she could emanate, catching air and life in it for him—maybe she could just fly up with him in her arms, she’d always wanted to be Superman—but it just seemed to make him cough, blue blood spattering his lips.

Something in her head clicked.

“All right,” she said, laying him down on the ground. “I’m gonna buy us some time.”

She contacted the ship—“I need somebody down here _now_ with transport and emergency medical gear”—and grabbed the one-to-one transfuser from her belt.

It wasn’t standard issue Kree equipment. It was just that for years all she’d known about her past was it had wound up leaving her short of blood. One-to-one transfusers were flimsy tech, cheap drugstore solutions for nutcases like her who didn’t trust there’d always be a Kree med-net there in time to catch them.

Huh. Apparently she’d had a suspicious streak even before Talos had come along and cracked the black box in her mind open again.

She knelt down beside Yon-Rogg, her knees in the blood and dust, and didn’t waste any more time giving him a speech about how this might not even work. It was her only shot. She was good at taking those.

She punched one end of the transfuser against the crook of her elbow, wincing as the needle bit down, and got the other end hooked up to him. She bled into him with her left arm and bandaged him up with her right hand, containing as much of the damage as she could reach without breaking the transfuser tether. She bent over him, her head swimming and her vision dark-edged, and she wiped the blood off his mouth to feel his breath, thin but there, against the back of her hand.

*

Carol woke up and immediately crushed one half of her sickbay bed by gripping it too hard, her hand luminescent. Soren, watching from the corner of the room and looking resignedly intrigued, said, “That is the second time you have done that in the last twenty-four hours.”

“Sorry. I really don’t like waking up confused.” The timeline, wrapped up like a knot, straightened out for her: the survey, the hell-plant, Yon-Rogg on the ground with his blood, her blood, their blood hot and everywhere around her.

She didn’t want to ask. She was good with problems and crisis situations. Not aftermaths.

_You have to ask. You’re only human._

“Is he—”

“Awake,” Soren said immediately. “I’m sorry, I thought you might remember from last time. Commander Yon-Rogg is alive and well.”

It was like a noose around her throat suddenly getting some slack. “Yeah, well, when you see him, tell him it wouldn’t have killed him to bring flowers or a teddy bear or something to his wife’s hospital room.”

“You want him to… bring you a bear?”

“A fake bear. A stuffed animal.” It was easy to give Soren a smile. “I’ll pick one up for your daughter the next time we swing by a vaguely Terran planet, she’ll love it, I promise. Anyway, no, I’m just saying he could acknowledge I saved his ass.”

“I can acknowledge that you’ve saved ours,” Soren said. “Unless you have some objection, we thought we’d try putting down roots here.”

“Maybe I’m still groggy. On the planet of _carnivorous plants?_ ”

“A certain number of predatory species are always to be expected on an unsettled world,” she said calmly. “And from what the commander told us, the plant didn’t attack until provoked. We can teach the children to avoid it.”

“Or you could flamethrower the shit out of it.”

“True.”

“I can find you a better place,” Carol said. “Seriously.”

Soren shook her head. “The atmospheric readings and the samples you were able to collect before the… carnivorous plant attack are all remarkably similar to our homeworld. We could look forever without finding perfection. I think at this point we’d all just like to stop running and start building our lives again.”

Carol bit back the urge to make another objection. Soren was a scientist; she knew the risks of planetary settlement better than Carol did. And she and Talos were way better-equipped, and way more entitled, to make decisions about when to finally halt the Skrull wagon train.

“Okay. I guess if you’re done running, then I’m done too. Time to go back to Hala and have it out with the Supreme Intelligence.” There was a bitter taste in her mouth. “Yon-Rogg will be happy. Once all that’s hashed out, he won’t have me eavesdropping on his emotions anymore.”

Soren considered this. “You still intend to end things?’

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“You said ‘wife,’ earlier. Implying you’re married by your own standards.”

“We’re married-ish,” Carol said. She didn’t know when she’d gotten to the point of thinking of it that way.

“I didn’t know there was an intermediate state,” Soren said dryly. “When it comes to love problems—”

Carol scoffed.

“—you should talk to Talos instead, he’s the romantic. _Four_ fireworks displays during our courtship. And the skywriting--I was almost too embarrassed to be seen with him for the ceremony. Very gushy.” She shook her head. “Also, Carol, I’m not very fond of your husband. But as your friend—”

She’d been keeping herself together—wasn’t like she had a good reason to fall apart—but there Carol’s vision blurred a little at that, startling her.

So she’d been right, she did have something here, some home on the other side of her two busted, interrupted lives. Friends, family, purpose. Even if she had to stop running, she was still in the middle of things.

Soren touched her shoulder. “Are you okay?”

“I’ll be okay if you don’t tell anyone I started crying.” She rubbed her eyes. “Sorry. Just—this is probably the best where-the-hell-am-I wakeup I’ve had in a while.”

“I can imagine,” Soren said, her voice soft. She went on holding Carol’s shoulder long after she needed to, her thumb rubbing little circles there. “You’re among friends. That’s a start.”

“It is.” She took a deep breath. “Okay. You don’t like Yon-Rogg. Fair enough. But you were saying?”

Soren’s eyes were kind. “I believe he would have been here when you woke up again if it hadn’t been his impression you’d prefer him elsewhere. He said, in fact, that you would have preferred him elsewhere well before you ever woke up, but that you’d have to ‘deal with it.’”

“Wow, I really admire his commitment to walking the fine line between consideration and dickishness.” She swung her legs over the side of the bed. She could find the shirt portion of her old Starforce uniform but not the rest of it. “Where are my pants?”

“You really shouldn’t get up yet,” Soren said, but she brought them over anyway.

Ride or die kind of friend, Carol decided. She’d have to see if she could ever get some kind of night out with Soren and Maria both.

She pulled the uniform pants on, whisking them with her palms until the top fabric melded to the bottom. She couldn’t find her boots—it was _one_ room, where the hell was Soren stashing this stuff?—but she decided to roll with it.

“I’ll be back,” she said.

It wasn’t hard to find him. She broke into his quarters—maybe it didn’t technically count as breaking and entering when he’d given her access, but she liked the sound of it better—and when he wasn’t there, she went to that crappy bubble-shaped rear observation deck and found him sitting there against the window, blatantly refusing to look at the stars or, apparently, anything else. His eyes were closed and his pallor had a kind of awful skim-milk blueness to it. He felt… _depressed._

“You look like a sick Flerken,” she said. “Assuming sick Flerkens look like sick cats.”

Yon-Rogg’s eyes shot open and he almost fell over trying to bolt upright, which was gratifying. “Carol!”

“In the flesh. It’s weird that I took longer to recuperate than you did, don’t you think? I mean, you were the one who had the vampire plant latched onto you, I just did a transfusion.”

“And clearly left sickbay without getting a formal release from Dr. Soren.” She was funnily relieved to see that they were back to rolling their eyes at each other. And more reasonably interested in him giving Soren her title. “You drained your _life-force_ into me along with your blood. It’s my understanding that when the rescue team arrived, you were sustaining my existence with _photon manipulation of my heart and lungs_. You exhausted yourself, you did what you always do, plunging into recklessness with a total disregard for—” He stopped, his mouth suddenly twisting. “And you’ll want to keep a certain separation between us.”

She’d been prepared to point out that he was _welcome_ for her doing all that, but the change in direction threw her off. “What? Why? Did you file divorce papers while I was sleeping or something?”

A hard, scoffing sound. “Not remotely. But you are—exposed.”

She looked down. Shirt. Pants. She raised her eyebrows. “Do you have a foot thing I didn’t know about?”

“I don’t understand what you could possibly be referring to,” Yon-Rogg said, in what she was beginning to be able to translate as, _I’m aware you brought up something sexual and I am an enormous prude._ “But no.”

She took a step towards him, jokily pointing out her toes like a dancer. “Funny how you manage to know the answer’s no without understanding the question—”

“You are not _shielded_ ,” he said tightly. “I can _feel_ you.”

Carol stopped.

Oh.

Now that he mentioned it, she could tell, vaguely. The same bond-enabled sixth sense that had let her feel her way to him showed her where her self-protection would have been, if she’d had it up. She could see how to get it up again. Maybe not perfectly, but workably.

But she didn’t do it yet. She said, “Why is that such a problem for you?”

He just looked at her.

“You still think my emotions are a problem,” she translated. “You don’t want them buffeting at you? You think they’re interference? What is it? What the hell is so important about your _perfect self-control_ that you couldn’t even be there for me when I needed you? Do you know how many feelings you cycle through in an _hour_? You are a fucking _mess_ and I—”

“I am not a mess,” he said defensively, somehow at the same time as he was saying, “I was doing it for _you_ ,” the words almost a perfect audio overlay. One of them had to be a feeling so strong she was picking it up with words, but she wasn’t sure which. One of those options had to be better than the other, but she wasn’t sure which. Either he was pretending to be shallow when he really cared about her or he was pretending to care about her when he was really shallow and self-obsessed; either he was pulling himself together to tell her the truth despite the idiocy in his head or he was just an idiot.

She didn’t know that this made anything simpler. They didn’t seem to have a setting for that.

She took a deep breath and replied to the part of the conversation she wanted to. “What do you mean, you did it for me?”

“You’ve never needed me,” Yon-Rogg said. His smile was perversely beautiful. “Not before, when I thought you were Vers, and not now that I truly know you. You don’t need the physical contact I always took for granted was a requirement of the bond. You shouldn’t even need me on Hala, you’re entirely capable of overhauling worlds on your own. Carol, I have nothing to give you. If I have nothing to give you, I have no right to take from you. And when you are here, now—I— _take_. What you undoubtedly had no intention of ever offering.”

She remembered her time off-ship: floating out there in the stars, the black all around her, the solar winds a hum against her bare face. And him, way off in the distance, whatever energy he gave off just a little brighter to her than any other star. She’d soaked the feeling of him in. She knew what it meant to take.

And it was true she didn’t need him. That she hadn't meant to lower her shields.

But none of this was about that. After the lies between them had finally stopped, none of this had ever been about how she had some horrible need that only could he fill. That was the lie the Supreme Intelligence had fed her to control her. It wasn’t the truth. It wasn’t what they were about.

She said, “You’re looking at it wrong.”

Yon-Rogg said nothing.

“I said we could be partners. Not whatever fucked-up imperial economics exchange you have in your head, where all our contributions have to be weighed before I can decide what you _deserve_. I said I’d marry you. I said I accepted the terms of the marriage. These—” She waved her hand around at the amorphous bond, the Skrull ship, their history. “These are the terms of the marriage.”

He opened his mouth, closed it, and then said, “Then you—”

Carol crossed the rest of the room and put her hands on either side of his face, drawing his forehead to hers. She held him like that for a moment and then kissed him, too gently to start something, too passionately to end it. A middle-ground kiss. Married-ish.

“I want you,” she said. “I don’t know that I want to drop all this once we’ve got Kree peace and harmony.”

It was good to feel him so close, to have the screwed-up tangle of his heart right next to hers. His blood, her blood.

“I’m glad I wound up giving you more than I meant to.” She wasn’t sure whether she meant the transfusion, the life-energy, or the collapsed shields in her head, the _trust_. “What if we just did that? And then we could see how it worked out.”

He took her hand in his and moved it to his chest, to where he’d once told her that emptiness in him lived, where all his convictions and all his assurances and all his self-satisfaction had turned to dust. Everything he got from her, everything she gave to him—she could feel it there now. The absolute concept of her, which he’d believed in even after everything else had failed. She pressed her hand down hard and felt his heartbeat. Her blood ran in his veins.

He said, “We can do that.” His voice was shaking.

“Good,” Carol said. She went on letting him feel her, giving him that: everything she meant and everything she didn’t know or couldn’t say.

His hands skimmed down her back, his fingers in the shallow dip of her spine.

Carol said, “You know they’re thinking of settling down here?”

He stood up, turning back to the window like the view would be different from a new angle. “Here as in _down there_? You can’t be serious.”

“Yep. Maybe they think it’s good luck to have a planet that almost killed you.”

She didn’t feel a sense of amusement from him about that so much as a dry agreement. “I suppose the advantage is that I don’t have any qualms about forgetting how to find this particular… paradise.”

“So you don’t want a belated honeymoon here, then?”

“Not if you intend to give me flowers.”

“I really don’t,” Carol said. She kissed him again, this time taking in the way the feeling reflected endlessly back and forth between them, mirrored over the bond, his desire magnifying hers and hers his until the hot soft touch of his mouth was almost overwhelming. No wonder he’d said this was private. She separated herself from him just long enough to say, “Lock door,” and hear the faint click as the ship’s computer complied.

Then there was no stopping it. She stripped down and then undressed him, yanking at his clothes so hard his shirt tore; she tried to be gentle when she saw the barbed-wire cuts he still had from the vines, but they weren’t gentle people. Anything they did was always going to reopen some old wound. It didn’t matter. She’d had his feelings and he’d had her touch and now they were on overload, both of them burning up with each other, so fuck it. She’d never been the careful kind.

She pushed him down to the bench and straddled him, not missing the reverent way he put his hands on her hips, the first intimate place she’d let him touch her.

 _Mutually assured destruction_ , Fury had called this. He’d said that was the risk she was taking.

But when she thought of everyone who’d ever meant anything to her, it didn’t feel that different. The chance of wrecking things was just the cost of doing business.

She curled her fingers around his shoulders, lowering herself down. _I pledge myself to you and allow our fates to be twined together._

Yeah, she thought, moving against him. She could do that. They could do that. She laced her fingers in with his and felt, bounced back again and again, the way they were holding onto each other.


End file.
